Where is Home?

Next year in Jerusalem the beloved lament
of a thousand years and another thousand
years had to happen at some time for it
was ordained that home is where the heart
is and that beating heart of a nation never
forsook its heritage and its collective memory
of a time before time returning finally as a
nation once despised and delivered by its
enemies to a world that viewed it with
suspicion and distrust in a widely circulated
diaspora where the heart yearned for home.
The anguish of its exile was a people's
dilemma one never forgotten, simply set
aside for an auspicious opportunity that
appeared never to arrive while in the interim
vast suffering and misery remained the lot
of the scattered remnants whose very
existence brought bloody pogroms and
expulsions anew. Resilient and determined
even they could not avert the final solution
that destroyed the greater part of its intolerable
existence. Their extermination served to grant
greater meaning to the need to return from
whence they had been exiled for Jerusalem
still awaited them while they awaited polite
and final permission from others to retake
what had been been wrenched from them.
And now that they had and reclaimed Judea
for Israel, a haven for its people their friends
and enemies alike deny them Jerusalem.